Angel in the Reeds
by AlreadyPainfullyGone
Summary: Set post 6.18 - A conversation between Dean and Castiel after the war ends. Castiel comes to Dean for confession. Angst, Character death  kind of  and a happy ending.
1. Chapter 1

Dean is sprawled on Bobby's couch, turning the bottle of phoenix ash over in his hands, when Castiel appears.

"Hey, how's..." Castiel waves a hand and Dean's voice disappears. He chokes lamely and mouths 'son of a bitch' as hard as he can, but Castiel barely seems to notice.

"I need you to be silent." He says, as if that explains everything.

Dean fixes his face firmly in a 'what the hell' expression and stands up threateningly. Castiel sighs.

"If I return your voice, do you promise to remain silent until I'm finished?" He says, gravely.

Dean nods and Castiel waves his hand again, apparently restoring whatever he'd taken from him.

There's a long expectant silence. At least on Dean's side it's expectant, Castiel appears to be gathering himself for something.

"I killed an angel today." He begins. Dean looks down at the floor, knowing that the division of heaven is prompting Castiel to fight his own brothers.

"Rachel...you met her." Castiel sighs. And Dean looks up, shocked. "Yes, she was one of my own." Castiel says softly. "I...have committed myself to strategies that some angels...Rachel included, find...objectionable. She tried to force a stop to it and I...couldn't let her."

Dean swallows.

"I'm using human souls to power the army that supports me." Castiel says, as if he's stating that he ate a sandwich Dean had been saving. "Most of them are bought...some stolen..." he sighs. "Balthazar saved the ship, the Titanic, on my orders – to create more people, more souls, for the war."

Castiel curls his hands into fists and looks down at the table between them. Dean tries to grasp what's happening.

"Are you..." he pauses, expecting a rebuke for speaking, receiving none, he continues. "Are you confessing? To me?"

"I need to tell someone." Castiel says, wearily and with a new edge of despair. "Balthazar...knows, but does not care in the way that I know you do." He swallows and looks up at Dean's eyes, boring down on him. "I need someone with a soul, Dean...someone who knows me."

"For what?" Dean scoffs, angrily slapping his hands down on the back of a chair. "Sounds like you've got everything worked out, squared away all neat like a freaking automaton."

"I don't have the luxury of humanity." Castiel says, his voice so dead that Dean almost believes it, accept...

"Your hands are shaking." He points out, and it's true, Castiel's fists are trembling, he looks paler than he did earlier when he had just yanked them forwards in time.

"Cas, this war..."

"Is over." Castiel concludes.

"You won?" Dean can't keep the surprise from his voice.

"I killed Raphael." He says, "I wouldn't exactly call it winning." He swallows. "Two billion souls, Dean...two billion people...and I feel nothing."

"Not true." Dean growls. "If it was you wouldn't be here, you'd be up there sitting quietly, or whatever angels do to celebrate." The joke falls flat. "What are you here Cas?"

Castiel pauses, then produces his angel sword from with his coat and lays it on the table between them.

"I'd like you to kill me now." He says softly. "Please." He adds, and then looks expectantly at him.

Dean freezes.

"Why?"

"Because I don't wish to..."

"Yeah, got that part...I thought you didn't feel anything for this? For them?" Dean insists.

"But I remember what it was like, to care about things...personally." Castiel says delicately. "I think I still can, after all you should have been expendable...you should have been beneath my attention during the war, and yet I continued to help you..." He grimaces. "I need you to do this for me now."

"You won." Dean says quietly.

"At the expense of two billion people." Castiel states gravely. "You've killed other monsters for less."

"You're not a monster."

"I hold a great similarity to one." Castiel says, and Dean thinks he detects a slight crack in the other man's voice. "I feel like one."

Dean picks up the sword.

Castiel lets out a short sigh, like he's relieved this is moving forwards.

"No." Dean says, and feels Castiel's sudden edge of desperation.

"Dean..."

"No." He repeats. "People die in wars, someone has to make tough decisions..." he's grasping at straws and he knows it. "You saved the world!"

"I...mortgaged it, to save heaven." Castiel spits. "I betrayed angels under my command, soldiers who believed in me..." he pauses, lips pursed in self disgust. "Three years ago...that would have been me, I would have been in Rachel's position...and I would have died for my morality." His eyes crease as he fights to make Dean understand. "My Father, resurrected me, time and again, and I believed it was because I was right in helping you."

"Cas..."

"Now I've become like them, like those I fought against, who I thought myself superior to..." he sucks in a breath. "Zachariah, Uriel, Raphael, Anna, Michael...Lucifer..." he flinches at the name. "Please do this, because I cannot..." He shakes his head. "Dean, I cannot...become the Morning Star, I can't tolerate the idea of being known for this...for carrying it with me for the rest of eternity."

Dean weighs the sword in his hand.

"So...don't live for eternity." He says slowly. "Cas...you can fall, Anna did and..."

Castiel looks pained.

"Do you honestly believe I deserve another chance? I've had so many Dean."

"You deserve a shot at life, Cas...not just being let back into the army, given back your damn mission statement." Dean growls, "If you fell, you could be have a family, people who love you...you could grow up and live your life and then die...you'd get to go to heaven, actual heaven, not...boot camp."

Castiel furrows his brow sadly and Dean's surprised to see an extra shine to the angel's eyes.

"We don't know that." Castiel says quietly.

"No one, would send you to hell Cas." Dean tries to reassure him. "And you deserve a chance at this...I'm giving it to you." He says firmly.

Castiel glares at him.

"I mean it Cas...you're better than this." Dean cajoles him.

Castiel doesn't move.

"Cas..."

"Close your eyes." Castiel murmurs.

Dean pauses, but does anyway, out of the darkness comes Castiel's voice.

"Don't open them until it's over."

He's about to ask, 'until what's over' when there's suddenly a roaring light that makes his eyelids flare with flesh tinted radiance. Angel screech fills his ears...

And he can hear Castiel screaming.

Screams he remembers from hell, the kind of screams that speak of inhuman torture that will never end because the victim is already dead. Castiel screams like a man who's heart is being eaten from his chest while his eyes are peeled open and his teeth broken off as his body is raped in every conceivable way.

Dean feels hot tears run from his closed eyes and burn away from his skin in the force of Castiel's light.

And then it stops.

"Cas?" he tries, but no answer comes.

He opens his eyes.

Bobby's living room, is gone. The back wall is blown open, shards of wood littering the floor and the furniture half torn apart. Through the gaping wall Dean stares out at the broken ground of Bobby's yard.

A hole in the ground suddenly disgorges ten feet of roaring water, straight up into the air.

Dean, despite the tension of the last half hour, lets out a quiet huff of laughter. Castiel, billion year old virgin, lets loose his grace as a freaking geyser.

Give it ten years and he might find that hilarious.

A hundred miles away, Pastor Ian Gellson is smoking at the bottom of a graveyard, sneaking a few quiet moments to himself after a particularly long and gruelling funeral. A squalling sound disturbs him and he turns to find a wriggling bundle of beige fabric balanced on a tombstone.

He picks up that wriggling baby and looks down at it, a boy, now quiet, and with a face almost entirely taken up by blue eyes.

That morning he and Ellie had received a letter saying they were too old to adopt.

He looks up at the sky, towards a heaven that doesn't really care about him one way or another, and thanks God for the blessing of a son.

A hundred miles away, in the opposite direction to Dean Winchester and an irate Bobby Singer. Charles Shirley, avatar of the lord, closes the book he was reading in the corner of a diner. A waitress brings him his third cup of coffee and he smiles, tipping her with a twenty dollar bill because she's already working overtime and her kid needs braces.

She looks down at the book on the table.

"I love that story." She says quietly, always modest, always pleasant. It's one of the reasons he likes coming here.

"It is a good one." Chuck says, taking his glasses off and setting them to one side.

As the waitress (Mindy) walks away, Chuck looks down at the picture of Moses in the reeds on the cover of his book. He touches his fingers to it and, one hundred miles away, the baby Castiel (shortly to be re-named Moses himself) quietens and begins to suck his thumb.


	2. Chapter 2

Dean doesn't hunt anymore. It's not that he'll ever admit he's too old, even though he is pushing fifty now. He still gets plenty of action, demons mostly, looking for the infamous Dean Winchester, Son of John and Mary, former Michael sword and kicker of a thousand black eyed assholes back to hell. But he doesn't cruise the byroads of America looking for trouble anymore. The impala has broken down, it's never been sold on for scrap because he couldn't bear it, but it's rusting to pieces despite its generous covering of tarps and oil cloths in the barn.

He has a barn now.

It came, as he thinks to himself wryly, with the house. A two story clapboard with a rusty wrought iron fence, peeling paint and a patchy roof of asphalt tiles.

He loves it, and it came cheap because he got it on one of his last jobs, and four of the previous owners had died there at the hands of a spiteful ghost.

He doesn't hunt anymore because he's simply tired of it. Tired of the eleventh hour reprieve that brings more misery a week later. Tired of the scratches, the bites, the stab wounds. Tired of having to have his own back and Sam's as well. Tired of always failing his own expectations and his father's – never saving enough people, blowing out of town in the wake of trouble.

So he bought a house, paid off the mortgage by handimanning his way around the immediate area, a town about ten miles off and a hamlet, twenty in the opposite direction. Now he lives alone, debt paid in full, in more ways than one.

It's a quiet kind of life. He doesn't grow anything on his patch of land, only crab grass and shrubs, with his lawn chair hidden in the green tangle of it. The barn stores the impala and his various tools and junk. The house is two stories of mostly bare rooms, the few he inhabits are sparsely furnished. He only needs a few things aside from the basic furniture and appliances – a few books, manuals for plumbing and gas fixtures as well as fiction, CD's, records, old movies on vhs and new DVD's.

The house is huge considering it's just him, but it reminds him of Bobby's rambling pile, and that was really the only home he ever knew. It was never his home, but it was a base, a place to go when he needed to rest up, or when Sam needed re-hab, the place they all went for safety, advice and help.

Himself, Sam, Rufus...countless other hunters.

And Castiel, of course.

He could never forget that.

Dean wears glasses sometimes, steel rimmed things that make his eyes ache when he squints. He has sciatica and is more susceptible to colds than he used to be. He's lucky considering that most hunters die within ten years of taking to the life – and he's been a hunter since he was a kid.

Sam's had cancer, cancer of the liver and stomach – a nasty time that was. Dean privately puts it down to drinking demon blood, but even so the treatment was fairly standard, rounds of chemo and a small amount of surgery. Sam was lucky, according to the doctors, it could have been worse. Afterwards Sam moved out to England, closer to the older academia and further from bad memories.

Rufus had died at the hands of one of the mother's creations, and Dean didn't think Bobby ever got over that. He was dead himself – old age crept in and made its home with Bobby – he got lucky too, going out painlessly in his sleep, belly full of rot gut and cheese steak, brain full of pleasant dreams, or so Dean hopes.

So that's everyone. Dean's the last of team free will. The last of the Winchester's still on American soil.

He's putting his groceries away for the week when he gets the call. Some things never change after all and bad timing is the badge of a true hunter. The phone call is from a distant friend of Bobby's, a Marcus Davies, who's chased omens as far as Dean's own town and would appreciate if he 'took care of it himself' because another job just came up elsewhere.

Dean dumps the last carton of milk in the fridge and goes back outside to revive the engine of his truck, ticking as it is in the fierce heat of the day. He drives to the edge of town, to the motel that all the signs seem pointed at – signs that read 'demonic activity' as opposed to 'free wi-fi and cable'. He reaches it in another burst of bad timing, bad because, though he's in time to witness the catastrophe – he's pretty sure he'll never forget the sight of it.

A family in a sedan pull out of the hotel.

A petrol tanker thunders down the main road.

Dean watches, stopped at a light and frozen in sixth sense disbelief – knowing what is about to happen and powerless to stop it.

The resultant fire engulfs the road, hot enough to melt the tar of it, burning fuel running down the street and towards the motel and the diner across the street. The explosion knocked the glass from both and smoke pours upwards, black and thick with poison.

Two parents, a priest and his wife. Their son is nowhere to be found.

Dean knows they have a son – he was checked in with his parents. But he's not in the wreckage, as far as the emergency services can tell.

He's almost given up searching the surrounding area when he spots the boy, maybe about twelve, standing under the awning of the general store, arms hugged around himself as he watches the fire being extinguished.

"Hey!" Dean raises his voice to be heard over the firemen and the foam being heaped on the burning vehicle. The boy looks at him, eyes huge in his pale face, a blur of blue over a skinny body encased in jeans and an olive green shirt. He bolts, rabbit quick in the opposite direction, Dean swears to himself and gives chase.

It takes him an embarrassingly long time to find the kid, curled up behind a dumpster sever streets away. But then, Dean can't run as fast as he used to and the kid is snappy with youth and easily outstripped him.

He kneels down next to the dumpster and looks behind it to where the boy is hunched between it and the fence.

"Hey, kid." He says quietly. "You're not in trouble ok...that was your family, in the car?"

The kid is shaking, but he nods, watching Dean warily like a small animal in a trap. The shirt, Dean realises, is a man's shirt, several sizes too large for the skinny pre-teen, and his shoes have holes in the bottoms.

"Ok...well, we're going to go somewhere safe now, and we don't even have to talk about what happened, not yet." Dean promises. He moves back a little. "Come on out."

To his surprise the kid looks up at him, blue eyes wary and young but calculating.

"Christo." He says quietly, and Dean stares at him evenly.

"I'm not a demon." He says, somewhat redundantly. "but I know them and they're going to be looking for you – so we have to go somewhere else, ok?"

The boy comes out from behind the dumpster.

"What's your name?" Dean asks as they walk back to his truck.

"Moses."

"You're kidding."

"No." The kid says blankly. He climbs up into the cabin of Dean's truck with the ease of someone who's never had one vehicle of his own, nothing familiar to hold on to. Dean knows the look the boy has in his eyes, the look of someone in hand-me-down clothes in a town built for passing through.

He knows not to speak on the ride to his home, that the boy needs the time to let the truth of the situation sink in – that the only things, the only people he has to call his own, are gone.

When he pulls up in front of the house the kid stirs from his trance and climbs down, following Dean into the house without comment.

"You want something to eat? Drink?" Dean pauses awkwardly in the kitchen, unused to dealing with kids, not since Lisa and Ben has he had to. "I've got milk or...uh...milk."

"I'm fine." Moses looks around the room without much curiosity. He pauses for a long moment, watching the tomato plants on the windowsill with unnatural intensity. "They weren't my parents." He says matter of factly.

"Oh." Is Dean's only response to that. Moses turns to face him.

"They found me." he says. "That's why the demons want me."

"Really." Dean pulls out a chair and sits down, eyes checking his wards out of habit. "And where did they find you?"

"In the cemetery...Father Gellson's cemetery." Moses takes the seat opposite him. "I was a baby, they found me, and they raised me." he looks for a moment on the verge of crying, then his face smoothes out, placid and emotionless once more. "Could I have a drink now please?" he asks.

Dean gets him a glass of milk. Moses drinks it calmly, methodically, lowering the glass and smoothing the milk moustache from his mouth with his thumb.

"Do you know who left you in the cemetery?" Dean asks.

Moses gives him a funny look.

"God did."

Dean frowns, a twilight zone feeling of 'not quite right-ness' flooding over him.

"Why do you think that?" He asks carefully.

"Because..." his brow furrows and he twists his skinny hands together on the table's surface. "Because I know it." He says quietly. "He told me so."

"And what did he say?" Dean asks.

The boys face contorts in an attempt to conjure up a dim memory.

"He said...you could be have a family, people who love you...you could grow up and live your life and then..." He looks a little upset, "and then...die...but you'd get to go to heaven, actual heaven, not..."

"Boot camp." Dean finishes, numbly.

"How did you know that?" Moses looks both intensely interested and yet terrified.

"I think maybe because I'm supposed to take care of you." Dean says quietly, looking into the eyes of someone he let go a long time ago...and wondering why the universe kept playing stupid games with him.

Moses. Castiel, looks at him, deep and assessing.

"Then you should buy some juice." He says bluntly.

Dean raises his eyebrows in an 'is that so' gesture.

"I'm tired." Says the boy. "Can I sleep somewhere?"

"Sure." Dean stands up. "Let's go make you up a room."


	3. Chapter 3

Dean sets up a room down the hall from his own, fitting the bottom sheet over the mattress, the duvet cover and pillow cases going on afterwards. It's surreal to think that he's making this bed up for his friend, his _dead _friend. Because Castiel has been dead to him for twelve years, out of reach and out of sight. But this young boy, there's an air of grace about him, even though he's graceless.

Dean realises of course that he has no real right to keep the kid with him, but if he hands him over to the police or a social worker...well, the demons are after him for a reason, and they've torn through people with more preparation to get at the kid.

Dean already feels like he'd be prepared to die for him.

It disturbs him and comforts him in equal measure, that the connection is still there. That perhaps Castiel isn't really gone.

Moses comes into the room silently and watches him work, but Dean knows he's there anyway.

"You want to help me with this?" he says, flicking the edge of the comforter at him. The boy takes it obediently and tucks it along the edge of the bed with a fierce look of concentration. Dean straightens up and looks around the room, it's kind of bare, there's nothing on the wall and no books on the shelves.

"Do you need anything?" he asks, but the kid just looks at him, puzzled.

"I have everything I need."

Dean fights a smile at that; he is Castiel after all, used to saving the world with only the contents of an ad-salesman's pockets to his name.

"Well...goodnight then." He says, backing out and going down the hall to his own room.

Dean looks through his journals for anything of relevance. His Dad's has nothing, neither do those of Rufus or Bobby and the Campbell journals don't mention angel's at all, save for one of Samuel's entries about meeting Castiel. There are some notes in a book that Sam must have kept during his soulless year, but they're mostly on the banishing sigils and how to kill the angel's themselves.

None of it helpful.

He flips through his own journal, surprisingly thick now that he comes to compare it to the others, but then, no other hunter has experienced Hell, the realm of fairies, Heaven or turning into a vampire.

Those kinds of things made for exceedingly long entries.

There is a whole section on angels, and it's divided between what he knows of their hierarchy, their magic, language, way of operating and the angel's themselves – Anna down to Zachariah, an A-Z who's who of the dead and the living angel's that he's encountered.

Castiel has his own book.

There was, in fairness, a lot to write about. Between Castiel raising him from hell, the seals, his betrayal of heaven, the rising of Lucifer, Jimmy Novak, Castiel turning human, Future Castiel _being_ human, the battle with Lucifer and then the war in heaven, Castiel's fall... Dean was pushing it to trim it down to one volume.

Sam found it a little self indulgent, and came close to calling Dean out on having issues with Castiel being gone. But Dean had doggedly committed everything he knew to paper, every piece of lore Castiel had shared with them, everything he'd done for them...

Plus a great deal of anecdotal 'evidence' explaining Castiel's love of Dean's personal bubble and discomfiture with sex workers.

There are stories about Castiel told by Bobby, by Sam – occasions when Dean wasn't around. Hell, there's even some stuff in there that Lisa told him, having met the angel only once when Raphael chose to attack Dean and his people, and Castiel intervened.

He'd been proud of him that day, for saving Lisa and Ben for him.

And then there was his fall – all noted down, all kept for Dean's own speculation, in the months where he felt as if Castiel might return any moment, and the clapping of wings as rooks fought overhead still made him jump expectantly.

Of all the journals, this is the most valuable to him. When, if...he starts to forget about Castiel, about everything that happened to him, to them...he'll have it to remind himself.

He works late into the night and crashes out on his bed only when his eyes start to burn with tiredness. He strips down to his T-shirt and underwear, tangling himself in the sheets as he lies down.

He dreams that he's back with Ben and Lisa, though he hasn't seen them in years, he's trying to build a swing set but he can't find the right screwdriver. He knows he has to finish before it rains.

He wakes up, frowning and blinking away the remnants of the dream, looking up at the ceiling where the shadows of rain falling beyond the unclothed window are clearly visible against the white plaster.

He rolls over to glare at the small body smushed against his side.

"I gave you your own room." He grumbles sleepily.

"I don't want to sleep in it." A soft voice replies. "Sorry." He says, sincerely.

Dean thinks on this for a moment.

"Are you afraid of the dark?" he asks.

"No." The voice replies blankly.

There's a silence filled only with the sound of rain on glass.

"I don't like it." Moses says in a small voice. "That's not the same as being afraid."

Dean remembers his Dad giving Sam a .45 for the monster under his bed. He'd never thought to agree with his brother that this was a case of shitty parenting – monsters were real - a gun could do more than a reassurance if one came at you in the middle of the night. But then, Sam hadn't known about monsters, not then.

This kid, he knows exactly what's out there, exactly what's coming to get him.

Dean slides over a little to give him more room, but leaves his hand lying between them, with the kid's fingers resting on top of it.

"Well, not liking the dark is smart." Dean says tiredly. "It's easier for things to sneak up on you, easier to lose your way..." he settles back into the bed. "But I'm not worried, am I?"

"No." Moses says after a pause.

"You know why that is?"

"No."

"Because I am old enough to have had everything in the book jump out at me in the dark." Dean says confidently. "Demons, ghouls, ghosts, vampires, shifters, skinwalkers, black dogs, succubae...

"What's a succubae?"

Dean feels a hitch of laughter in his chest.

"It's not important, you'll find out when you're older." He taps the boy's hand. "Point is, I know exactly what could come out of the dark...and exactly what to do when it does." He closes his eyes pointedly. "So you're safe with me, ok?"

There's a short, doubtful silence.

"Ok." Moses settles down.

Dean is left to wonder at the stupidity of him trying to protect Castiel, or what was left of Castiel, from the dark.

He'd never been able to protect him from anything else.


	4. Chapter 4

"Ok, plan of action." Dean says the next morning, once they're both awake and seated at the breakfast table – Castiel still in the same clothes he was wearing the previous day.

Dean pauses and tries to forget how many times in the past few years he's sounded like his father.

He's getting old.

Castiel looks up at him curiously, abandoning the slight moue of dislike he's been aiming at his glass of milk.

"We need to get you some clothes." Dean says, taking a swig of poisonous black coffee and wincing. "Shirts, pants, pyjama's and..." he sighs, "tooth brush, shower stuff...maybe some books...what do kids do now?"

Castiel blinks at him.

"I don't know."

Dean sighs. Some things never change. Moses (and he must remember that that is who this kid thinks he is) carries the same cluelessness and odd curiosity of his previous form.

Moses blinks again and the moment is gone, it's just a kid eating toast across from him.

"We'll get you some juice as well." Dean says, as a concession. Moses looks appeased by this.

They end up going to Wal-Mart of all horrors, because it's two towns over and Dean doesn't want to run into anyone looking for the missing boy. He figures that once the heat dies off on the search he can introduce Moses as his nephew or something.

Shopping takes a while because the kid has no strong feelings about any item of clothing, and Dean has never shopped for a child before.

"This?" he holds up his fiftieth T-shirt and the kid gives his fiftieth shrug. "Ok, one of us is going to have to make a decision here."

Moses chews his lip anxiously.

"Have you never picked clothes before?" Dean asks exasperatedly.

The kid shakes his head.

"That explains it." Dean sighs. "Just...find something you like, in the right size – I'll be over there looking for socks."

Dean watches as an intent Moses disappears amongst the racks of cheap cloth. Socks, he can handle. But he keeps half an eye on him anyway – no sense taking stupid risks with demons in the equation.

Eventually Moses returns, tentatively holding onto a bundle of clothing.

"Let's see." Dean goes through the things whilst the kid waits uneasily, he catches his eye. "Dude, there are no wrong answers in Wal-Mart ok? You're not going to get into trouble."

Moses looks unconvinced.

He's chosen two pairs of black slacks, three shirts (one white and two pale blue) and a pair of black loafer type shoes. Basically – church clothes. It's only the kid's nervousness that stops Dean from pointing this out. He adds his chosen socks to the pile, picks up a packet of blue boxers with an odd sense of embarrassment, and proceeds towards the boys clothing. He picks out a few T-shirts at random, an over shirt, a pair of jeans.

"You're going to need more than three shirts." He says lightly, "Go pick out something to sleep in."

Moses picks a pair of cotton sleeping pants (plaid) and a white T-shirt. Dean's so happy he picked something halfway normal for a pre-teen that he takes Moses to the book section and tells him to get some things to keep him entertained.

This sets off a whole new wave of problems.

"I don't know what to pick." He says worriedly, and Dean watches with vague amusement as he looks through the stacks of books that were surely printed especially for the back shelves of the store – half assed teen vampire novels, romances, action blockbusters from unknown authors and coffee table books about aromatherapy and border collies.

"What do you like to read?"

The kid gives him 'the stare' again.

"Father Gellson read me the Bible." He frowns. "But I know that."

"You know the Bible?" Dean doesn't know if that's funny or sad.

"Mmmhmm...You can test me." Moses looks up at him guilelessly as if expecting such a test to come out of the blue.

"No...I'm ok right now." Dean assures him, "Just pick three books and odds are you'll like one of them."

So Moses picks three books at random. One is the touching story of an autistic boy and his dog, one is a guidebook of Bolivia, and one is...

Dean laughs to himself.

The first in the Supernatural Series by Carver Edland.

God, whether he exists or not, continues to contrive to make his life as eerily symmetrical as possible.

They round out the days purchases with juice, the one earthy pleasure Moses seems familiar with, as well as cereal (picked by Dean) and beer (because when this is over he's going to need a drink).

On the way back home Dean attempts to broach the subject if Moses' childhood, mainly because the kid is too weird for it simply to be inherited from Castiel.

"So...the Father and his wife... they were pretty strict?" he asks, wincing at his own callousness, they'd only died a day ago.

Moses shrugs.

"They kept me safe." He says, as if that's all there is to it.

Dean lets that go in silence, for a while.

"You know...my Dad, he kept me and my brother safe when we were kids." He taps the steering wheel thoughtfully. "But sometimes...when someone's trying to keep you safe, you end up missing things...and you lose something that everyone else has, when you think you're in danger all the time."

"Lose what?"

"I don't know." Dean admits, but he's sure that what he's saying is true - he's been sure for years. It's why he could never settle down with Lisa, why he lived alone and could never relax into normal life. Why he'd missed Castiel so much. "Something important."

Moses looks slightly upset by this. Dean fights to back pedal, realising that he can't just unload his own emotional crap on a kid.

"It's nothing bad...it's just like...knowing two languages – you can't pretend you don't understand everything around you like everyone else does – because you know what it all means."

The kid remains quiet and contemplative, Dean decides not to drive the point home any further.

There's nothing much to do once they get back home. Moses settles in the living room to read his new books quietly. Dean leaves a message for Sam on his cell phone, asking him to call back as soon as he gets it.

Dean makes them macaroni cheese for dinner, which the kid eats and washes down with a glass of grapefruit juice. Dean has a beer and watches the second half of a football game he doesn't really care about, Moses perches on the couch and finishes the novel about the autistic kid and his puppy – for a twelve year old Moses reads amazingly fast, but when he reaches the end he just huffs unhappily and drops the book onto the coffee table.

"Not good?"

The kid shrugs.

"What didn't you like about it?" Dean's never been much for literary criticism, but it's something to talk about.

"It wouldn't have happened like that." Is what the kid comes up with.

"Not realistic enough?"

He shakes his head.

"Well, you might be out of luck, fiction wise then." He points out.

"It can be made up – it just has to mean something." Moses said stubbornly. "What's the point in a story that doesn't mean anything? It's just a lie."

Dean has no answer for that.

It's not the last thing to make him wonder. At a reasonable hour Dean makes various grumbling sounds of the 'time to turn in' variety.

He's not entirely surprised when the kid goes to his own room to put his sleeping things on, before returning to Dean's bedroom to crawl under the covers.

He isn't surprised.

But he wonders what the hell he's aiming for here – what exactly is he going to do with the kid, aside form keeping him safe? What's he hoping for? That Castiel will remember? Because those memories are a death sentence, Dean knows that. So he's left, sleeping beside a child who thinks of him as a stranger, a kind man who's sheltering him from the demons.

Dean snorts bitterly to himself.

A guardian angel.


	5. Chapter 5

_The long awaited last part of this story. As usual you can follow me at JollySnidge on twitter._

Dean wakes up in the middle of the night when something whimpers against his chest. In a reflex owing to a childhood of Sam and his clinging-limpet-arms, Dean twitches awake and wraps his arms over the shivering body on his chest before he's conscious enough to open his eyes. Moses whimpers again, the kind of soft, snuffly whimper that speaks of childhood fevers and flannel pyjamas. Dean makes 'shush-ing' sounds and raises one hand to the back of Moses' head, feeling the warmth of sleep there, the comforting heaviness of his coconsciousness. Memories of Sam, memories of Ben, prick at him and he unconsciously tries to move away from the humidly warm body that's resting on his chest, from the memories that it invokes.

Moses curls his hands against the cotton of Dean shirt and whines in the back of his throat like a scared animal trapped in a dream. "No." He whimpers, though is comes out more as 'Nnnn'. Dean gets the point and stops trying to shift him.

"Moses?" He whispers, and the body stirs unhappily.

With his heart in his throat Dean chances – "Cas?"

"Dean." It's a sigh in the shape of his name, and the child's restlessness ceases almost instantly. Dean squeezes the fragile body and leans to rest his nose on the top of his head, feeling the tightly curling dark hair bristle against it. Back when he used to sleep beside Sam (small, younger and freer) this is how they'd rested.

Painful as it is to recall, Castiel is close, closer than he's been for years - and Dean can still feel the boy's voice resonating in his ears - Castiel saying his name – recognising him.

It brings him no small measure of peace.

So the weeks pass, turning to months and finally a year. Dean raises Moses as he would have his own son, caring for him day to day, looking after him when he's sick like a worried mother hen, and taking him out hunting nothing larger than the crows that attack his primate vegetable garden.

Moses has helped him to paint the rusting metal fence that surrounds the property, and the boy became obsessed for a short while with hanging empty beer bottles on furls of string from the dead tree behind the barn. Now whenever the wind blows strongly the glass vessels chink and rattle together, a song of destruction and chaos.

Sam has visited only once from England, bringing a set of supernatural books over for Moses and watching the dark haired boy curiously as he went about his business, chirping the odd songs he sometimes sings under his breath. Dean wonders if they're ancient greek, or Hebrew, but Sam couldn't identify the language and told him so.

Dean has dubbed it colloquial Enochian – the language of Castiel's heavenly past.

Moses for his part has loosened up a little, he reads a lot and plays outside in the yard, although 'plays' might be the wrong word. He builds odd heaps of stones and stray sticks, augmented with leaves. Once or twice Dean recognises a symbol from his Dad's journals. The boy also climbs trees, sits on the roof and on one occasion Dean swears he saw him talking to a fox that had strayed onto his land.

Moses has a soft spot for all creatures, but particularly birds, and Dean has a cupboard full of boxes of trill seed, scraps of soft felt and pipettes because of the sheer number of wounded fledglings that Moses brings in to nurse.

Although the boy now sleeps in his own room, Dean has cracked open an eye on some nights and found the pale form of Moses standing in the corner of the room, watching him sleep. At first it had scared the hell out of him, now he just lets it slide and asks Moses if he'd like to lie down if he's intending to stay the night. Sometimes he does.

Moses' attraction to the supernatural novels has only increased, and he's read all the old ones, and also the new set published just before the apocalypse that wasn't. Dean's concerns that Moses might recognise himself in Castiel proved unfounded, though even Dean had trouble recognising his friend in the stoic warrior presented in Chuck's work. He was very stern and very seldom mentioned, and Dean put that down to Chuck (and most of the fans) wanting to focus on the epic-totally-not-gay-honest love between Sam and Dean.

And then comes the night Dean has been dreading.

The night the demons find them.

Dean wakes up suddenly to the sound of the bottles in the tree rattling together, the branches thrashing, and just like that he's back in Lawrence, the night his mother died, listening to the tree in the yard bend and sway in an unnatural storm.

He's out of bed, running to the kid's room in his t-shirt and boxers, bare feet slapping on the boards.

The door is bouncing it its frame, rattling and groaning. Dean struggles with the handle, but it refuses to open.

Then the screaming starts.

"Moses!" Dean hammers on the door.

'_Take your brother and run, Now Dean, Go!" _

He's battering down the door with his shoulder before he has time to think, listening to the sibilant hissing of the demon smoke beyond, and the sounds of struggling and screaming as the boy inside the room attempts to fight. Then the screaming stops, suddenly, and Dean feels a spike of fear.

"Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum..." Moses begins to chant, voice quivering in fear even as he does so.

"Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris." Dean joins in, and the boy's voice grows stronger as he hears his surrogate father's words, strong and level from just outside of the room.

"Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo. Amen." They finish together, and the door stops shaking, Dean shoves the remains of it aside and skids on the slivers of wood scattered over the floor.

Moses is standing in the middle of the room, a cut across his lip and his eyes huge in his pale face. He looks especially small in his plaid pyjama pants and t-shirt, shivering and shaking. Behind him the window glass has been blown out, the salt line that had been across the window is scattered in particles across the boards.

Dean wraps his arms around the shivering boy and lifts him up.

"Ok, we need to get downstairs." He murmurs. "It's going to be ok." He cups the back of Moses' head, "Ok?"

The boy nods fitfully and Dean hurries out of the room and down the stairs into the kitchen. He shoves open the door beside the refrigerator and runs down the wooden stairs beyond. Behind him the windows smash, rain and wind blustering through the salt lines. Whatever is after him it's powerful, possibly more so than anything he's ever faced.

In the basement is Bobby's legacy, a panic room. Dean cranks open the solid iron door and steps inside, lowering Moses to the floor and turning to slam the door closed behind him. Inside the vault is much like Bobby's, only painted white with the protection symbols scrawled in black. There's a bed, shelves of provisions, a gun rack and boxes of salt rounds, holy water vials and miscellaneous supplies.

"It's the same thing that killed the preacher." Moses whimpers.

"They can't get in here." Dean tells him.

"We'll have to leave eventually." The kid balls up on the bed. "They'll take me...it said it would take me."

Dean casts about but there's nothing he can use down here, not if it really comes down to it. The demon isn't in a body, it's free flowing, so the colt in the vault and ruby's knife strapped to his ankle won't really do much.

"You're not going to win." The voice comes from outside the room and Moses closes his eyes and whines when he hears it. "We're going to cut him open, leech the grace from his bones."

Dean has never felt so powerless in his entire life.

Something bangs against the outside of the door, the wheel at its centre begins to turn and Dean snatches up the colt, for all the good it'll do. Nothing is going to shred what's left of Castiel, not while he's still breathing.

The door slams open and Dean braces himself for anything. What he's not expecting as a great, empty, nothing, a square of howling darkness.

Invisible force flings Moses at the door and he disappears into the dark.

Dean throws himself after the boy, only to have the vault door shut in his face. As he hammers on the reinforced iron all he can hear is screaming, soft laughter and the rushing of demon smoke. Dean shouts every curse word, every piece of holy writ and every Enochian syllable he knows at the door. Nothing helps, nothing will get him to Moses now, and the only son he ever had a claim to, the friend he promised to protect, will die in unspeakable pain.

"Cas!" he struggles with the crank on the door.

Light floods the tiny cracks around the door, static noise shrieks through the air and Dean's heart thumps once, loudly, against his ribs.

He's never been so glad to hear angels.

He backs up from the door as the crank twirls open and it swings towards him. Moses comes through the door, bourn unconscious in the arms of a thin figure swaddled in jeans and a hooded sweater.

Dean takes the boy from the angel without hesitation, cradling him close and checking for injuries.

"He's fine."

Dean looks up and feels a flood of relief so intense it's almost painful.

"Why don't you put him down on the bed?" The angel says gently.

Dean lowers Moses to the bed and sits down beside him.

"Cas...how are you here?"

Castiel sits down beside him, lowering his dark hood, and he looks the same as he always did underneath.

"I've been here for a while."

"Playing invisible again?" Dean huffs.

"No." Castiel strokes the child's hair. "I've been here, Dean."

"Any chance of a straight answer...I heard you obliterate yourself Cas."

The angel nods gravely.

"I fell, I became Moses, I still am...Moses." He breathes softly. "And you raised me...and then something happened, where my grace fell...and I was just me again..." Castiel looks at him sideways. "Yesterday you died. Aged 79."

"Surprised I lasted that long." Dean says quietly. "So you just...came all the way back here to save your own skin?"

"This is how it always happened." Castiel tells him. "I remember it, when I was him." He touches his younger self with supreme affection, almost too hard to watch. "I was saved by a light, and when I woke up, I had two father's instead of one."

"You raised yourself?" Dean says, instead of 'You're staying?'

"Yes...and when I recovered my grace we became one and the same again." Castiel says instead of 'I won't leave you again'

"Figured you wouldn't get a nice normal family." Dean murmurs.

Castiel smiles at him.

"When have I ever been normal?" He raises a hand and touches Dean's face gently. Moses stirs between them, a small content sound sighing out of him.

"What about heaven?" Dean asks. "About, forgetting what happened..."

"You promised me a family, who loved me." Castiel says lightly. "And you have been, my friend, my brother, my father and my lover...that is all I needed."

"You could have told me that." Dean says, managing a half smile.

"I don't think even He knew." Cas says sagely, the capital 'H' evident in his tone. "And there will be time for heaven, when we are done here, young Moses will leave me, and return to this moment...and the older part of me will journey on with you."

"As long as you have a plan."

"I've never had a plan Dean." Castiel sighs, lying down slowly and curling up beside his younger self. Dean lies down on the other side, and together they lay their arms over Moses' sleeping form.


End file.
